After Rep. Shelia Stubbs’ confirmation as director of the county human services department was rejected by the full Dane County Board, Isthmus staff writer Eric Murphy, who had been covering the contentious process, spoke with Stubbs and several board members. Two singled out media coverage as problematic.
Stubbs, who claimed her nomination faced opposition because she is Black, similarly said the media targeted her because of her race. “The media has hyped my confirmation up,” she told Murphy. “Black leaders have been under attack. [Reporters] only want to report on negative things.”
She also questioned why her confirmation was followed so closely by so many media outlets. “I didn’t get this much media when I was profiled,” she said, referring to the national press she received after reporting that a constituent called 911 on her while she was campaigning in 2018 for the state Assembly.
Supv. Heidi Wegleitner, who chairs the county Health and Human Needs committee, which held the first hearing on Stubbs’ nomination, also expressed surprise at the outsize nature of the press coverage, given how little she sees written on county issues these days. Had the reporters who covered Stubbs’ nomination been regularly reporting on the human needs committee, she added, they would have had important context for the issues raised during the confirmation process.
“I think folks who know me know there’s nothing new about me asking for information from the administration,” she said. “The substance and the important work of the committee really got lost.”
The amount of media coverage devoted to the confirmation, relative to general coverage of the county, was not lost on me either. With the advent of the internet, and the economic damage it has inflicted on print advertising and journalism in general, news outlets, including Isthmus, have shrunk. One of the impacts we have seen locally is the loss of county beat reporters — that is, reporters whose sole focus is to cover county government and county issues. That’s been painfully clear for years.
“At county board meetings there were at least half a dozen seats reserved for the press,” says David Ripp, who has served on the county board since 1984, longer than any current member. “It wasn’t always full but it was a lot of the time.”
Now, he adds, “there is very rarely anybody there.”
Bill Novak is one of the reporters who filled those seats Ripp is talking about. Now retired, Novak was the county reporter for The Capital Times from 2001-2008.
During those days, he recalls, there would routinely be a handful of reporters at each board meeting, including reporters from the two dailies, one of the suburban weeklies and a TV station or two.
In addition to attending the bi-monthly board meetings, Novak would also make it to three or four committee meetings a week. And, he’d cover town meetings around the county as well. The issues debated there, Novak notes, had the potential to substantially impact people’s lives — things like expanding a highway or siting a gravel pit. “There were valid, personal questions for people who are looking out for themselves as they have to.”
And to the point made by Wegleitner and Stubbs about selective county coverage, “As a beat reporter, it’s not pick and choose,” says Novak. “You cover the beat. You go after it. You hear something so you make phone calls and all of a sudden, you have a story.”
But, in an aside, Novak makes an important point. While that type of ongoing and incremental coverage is, without question, in the interest of an informed citizenry and a strong democracy, it can — and often does — take a personal toll.
“Covering a beat can have an effect on your family, your home life, your kids,” says Novak. “A lot of the reason reporters leave is because the hours are all over the board. You don’t know if you have to work on a weekend. If you’re on a governmental beat, there are no real set hours.”
In other words, there is much personal sacrifice involved in doing this kind of work, something that I don’t think much of the public realizes or acknowledges. And, as we’ve recently seen, unpredictable days are not the only bad part of the job.
There are also the gatekeepers.
In a complaint released to the public May 26, former and current Madison school staffers recount what they saw as the “offensive and dismissive treatment of Madison-area journalists, especially female journalists” by school district spokesman Tim LeMonds. The accounts are pretty shocking and it’s clear why LeMonds sued to keep the document under wraps, even when the district determined it was bound by the open records law to release it. He called former Wisconsin State Journal reporter Beth Beyer “a horrible human being,” saying on one occasion, “I fucking hate Beth Beyer.” He also called NBC15 reporter Elizabeth Wadas “a pig of a journalist” in a Zoom meeting with staff and said she was “quickly becoming the sleaziest journalist in Madison.”
Communications staff in the released complaint expressed concern about how LeMonds’ behavior impacts “the district’s ability to communicate broadly with the community.”
That is almost certainly more true now that the contents of the complaint are public. Beyer, interviewed for our story on the complaint, said that if she were a new education reporter she would not contact LeMonds with media requests. “I would go around him,” she said. “I would not want to work with him at all.”
LeMonds, in response to the record’s release, claimed the complaint “was thoroughly investigated and all allegations were found without merit.” Actually, as Scott Girard of The Capital Times has reported, the district in its filings with the court stated that only some of the allegations were found to lack merit. And much of what is alleged in the complaint is backed up with links to recordings and other evidence. I think there are legitimate questions to be asked about what kind of investigation was done, how investigators arrived at their conclusion, and whether LeMonds should continue in his post.
In his lawsuit, LeMonds argued that release of the complaint would “jeopardize” his “ability to credibly perform his duties as MMSD’s chief public spokesperson.” There’s no reason to doubt that argument now.
